AUBURN HILLS >> The Pistons knew what was coming, they just couldn’t stop it.

After four straight timeouts, two by each team, Dion Waiters drilled the game-winner at the buzzer to give the Cavaliers a 97-96 win over the Pistons Wednesday night.

Cleveland called timeout with 3.2 seconds trailing by one. Detroit then called a timeout and then a 20-second timeout. The Cavaliers’ Luol Deng called a fourth straight timeout when he couldn’t find anyone open on the inbounds play.

After the plethora of timeouts, Deng found Waiters for the game-winner and Pistons head coach John Loyer said his team had a pretty good idea of the play that was coming.

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“We had an idea of the two or three plays they could run,” Loyer said. “They ran the one we diagrammed when they called timeout and they ran one of the two that we showed them that they would run after the timeout. Waiters made a big shot.”

Pistons guard Kyle Singler said they didn’t change anything in the timeouts and were going over the possible plays Cleveland would run.

“Not scheme wise, but we were just trying to figure out what play they were running,” Singler said. “We figured it out and knew what they were going to do. We knew either Dion or Jack was going to get the ball, that’s what happened, it was just a tough shot.

“I thought the odds were in our favor. Waiters hit a tough shot in the corner. I thought Rodney played as good of defense as he could. We had a good feeling what play they were going to run, he just made a tough shot.”

The loss the was the Pistons 10th this season by five points or less. Detroit has struggled to closeout games all season.

“It’s a screwy situation,” Singler said. “We played well enough to win, we should have won, but the ball just didn’t bounce our way. It wasn’t just tonight. We’ve had a few game-winner losses. More times than not you kind of end up on the other side of the ball, but not this time.”

Loyer said there isn’t one problem that they can solve in the close losses, but they will continue to work at fixing it.

“It kind of changes each time,” Loyer said. “I don’t think we had quite the movement in the fourth quarter that we had the previous quarter. We had 27 assists so I thought the ball moved for the most part the entire night. We missed some shots and again we didn’t get to the free-throw line tonight. We shot 7 for 13. You gotta convert when you get there and we gotta get there a little bit more.”

“It’s never easy when you lose, but you point out what we need to get better at and you keep working at it. There’s no magic cure. If there was we would have used that by now.”

Draft pick watch

The Pistons (26-45) have the eighth worst record in the NBA and would get to keep their draft pick barring a team moving ahead of them in the draft lottery. Detroit owes a first-round pick to Charlotte, but it’s top-eight protected.

Cleveland (29-44) has the ninth worst record and is two games ahead of the Pistons. Sacramento (25-45) holds the seventh worst record and heading into Wednesday’s late games was a half game behind the Pistons.